Flave.3065

So a few points from someone who has accumulated a lot of hours of training people in raids as well as raiding on various skill levels. I personally started out in a 450+ people super casual guild with people that had almost no raid experience. A lot of these big guilds btw. do offer some raid intro or practice for new people and so did my guild. There I was able to play more or less whatever I wanted to as long as I was able to somewhat contribute to the raid. After some time this wasn't enough for me and I started to join trainings on RTI and Crossroads Inn. Both of these guilds have their pros and cons when it comes to what they require and what they offer. As a trainee (back then with little to no experience as mentioned) what annoyed me most were people that didn't bother to invest even the smallest amount of time to know their classes to a level where they can contribute. Contributing at this stage really just means you kinda know what your class can do and you have an idea of a rotation if you are a DPS player that does not leave you multiple thousands of DPS behind other new players. After I gathered some experience I started my journey to commander with the sole and only intend to introduce new people to raids in a "casual" atmosphere. I think I only ever asked one person to show me what build they play since the person really held the group back massively. (DPS class doing less DPS than a healer) What I encountered a few times however were people asking how they can improve and do more DPS only for me to realise they play something they've seen somewhere on some site that is totally geared towards open world or even something they came up themselves. The problem is I as a commander cannot possibly know all possible variations of builds that is out there. So if a trainee asks me what to improve with a random build I won't be able to help usually outside of some general tips of what is good and what isn't which usually ends up with a tendency towards the meta. That is where having guidelines that "enforce" meta builds become very helpful. As a commander I may have not played that specific build but I equipped myself with the skills to read logs and check whats going wrong using those. Now to the tiertesting part. I myself was a tiertester for quite some time at Crossroads. First of all we even had some builds that were not on Snowcrows on our benchmark sheet which we allowed for tiers. I strongly belive there needs to be a limit of builds that are allowed since it takes quite some time to review the performance of people on the golem and bosses. If you now have to cover all possible variations that people come up with you either need a few extremely dedicated and knowledgable people that do those reviews or you need an army of people. Both things unfortunately don't work. There are not enough of those extremely knowledgable people that are available enough to do this and there aren't enough people to cover it with an army while keeping quality at a decent level. If you do not have such a "Tier" or "Skill" system it becomes increasingly hard for you to ensure you have good enough players for harder bosses. And some bosses in raids just need people that play on a certain level. Most of the people do not get to this level on non-meta builds. And as a community guild you have to focus on the masses and not a select few individuals. Another point is that a raid training guild is not just there to get you into raids but also to provide you with the opportunity to improve over time. If custom builds were accepted that would be extremely hard to accomplish and when we get to a certain point you will end up with the fact that meta builds just outperform non-meta builds. Lastly, I just wanted to remind everyone here that all those toxic raiding elitists that are in those raid training guilds are doing all of these things voluntarily in their free time to help people get into raids and improve. They spend hours and hours every week organising trainings, preparing materials (FAQs, introductions to classes etc.), commanding trainings, reviewing tier applications, answering questions and so on. I do not believe it is too much to ask from someone that wants to profit from those offerings to spend some time to prepare accordingly. Having a meta build with somewhat acceptable gear (that can be exotic without any infusions) is realy not that hard and even spending 30 minutes on a golem to have a first grip of the rotation is not much if you ask me. If you don't wanna do that try to get into one of those massive guilds out there that offer some raid introductions. They usually ask for even less. (Disclaimer: I am no longer in any capacity doing anything at any training guild. I am now a grumpy retired raider that plays a bit of casual WvW here and there but apart from that quit the game)

For elitist players this is merely Quality of Life. Most players on the top-end of the game be that Raids, PvP or WvW have so much ascended gear and also materials/gold that it doesn't really matter too much. You just have a lot less of annoying swapping if the meta changes and you need new stats or you want to play around with stats a bit. If you only play open world and enjoy GW2 that way you don't even need anything legendary. You can literally run around in exotic stuff and have fun the same way. It doesn't really matter since almost all open world content is made in a way you don't really need to optimize your gear or even build for.

I have a good suggestion for you: Go back to PvE look at the nice views in all of Tyria enjoy the landscape! It is really nice. Also it does not really challenge you and you can just walk through it. If raid enrage timers are a problem for you you may want to reconsider doing raids at all. As you say it is a team oriented gamemode. Some people are there to heal, some to give boons and some to do DPS. If you are not doing any of that you are a burden to your team and should stop raiding or learn (there is a ton of guides around) how to play raids.